She said 'rubbery.' Just tell me if there's anything ahead of us.
He made a series of sharp clicks. Mira jumped; he hadn't had any way to warn her, although as far as he could tell, the clicks were pitched low enough that they shouldn't bother a human. As the echoes came back to him, and the highly developed spatial part of his brain interpreted them, the entire surrounding part of the structure sprang into a sort of mental 3D model, complete with the locations of human figures—and a few shifted ones—moving about in the halls.
Then the entire image was blotted out with a scream.
At least that was what it felt like. He only realized thathewas screaming when he shifted back, flat on his naked belly on the floor, his head splitting and his entire body ringing with a deafening, high-pitched noise.
"What's that?" Mira asked. She fell to her knees beside him, wincing. "Is that the noise that guy was talking about earlier? It must be louder, I couldn't hear it before—Dane, are you all right?"
Dane merely shook his head. Unable to get up, nauseated and dizzy, he reached for the bundle of clothing in her arms and blindly tore off two strips that he jammed in his ears. That helped a little.
"We gotta go," he said hoarsely. His voice seemed to reverberate inside his sore skull. He grabbed Mira's arm and used her support to pull himself to his feet. She started to offer him his clothing, but he shook his head. "Minute. Gotta get outta here. They know it's me. Forward—that way's clear."
He needed Mira's support to walk, even with the makeshift earplugs. His balance was shot. They were in a stairwell when the noise cut out and suddenly he could think again. He wrenched out one of the earplugs so he could hear again, but kept it balled up in his hand in case of need.
"What happened?" Mira asked.
"It's a weapon aimed specifically at me," Dane said grimly. He grabbed the pants from the pile of clothing she handed him, yanked them on, and took the gun, leaving the rest.
Mira drew her own gun, and kept abreast of him. "What is it, just a loud noise?"
"It's just noise, but it screws my senses all to hell. I had to deal with it outside too."
"I think the mercs in here can hear it, and it bothers them," Mira said. "But it's not as incapacitating for them as it is for you."
"They might have earplugs. Hmmm." He felt in the cargo-style pockets and got lucky on the second try; there was a small foil-wrapped packet. Dane displayed it triumphantly to Mira and handed it to her.
"Why are you giving this to me? You're the one who needs them."
"Yes, but if I get hit with that again,you'rethe one who'll have to unwrap them and help me get them in. I might not be good for much. And if I put them in now, we can't communicate."
They made their way deeper into the facility. As he recovered from the pulse of sound, Dane moved with more assuredness. His recent echolocation scouting was overlaid on his mental model of the facility, and he became more confident as they went down into the parts of the fortress that he knew better, which didn't seem to have changed much since he was last here.
He was aware, however, that they were on a rapidly ticking clock. If the Colonel figured out how devastating the sonic weapon was to him, even the earplugs might not help much.
The stairs ended at a large metal door. Dane paused with his hand on it.
I wonder if it's still the same as it was.
"Dane?" Mira asked quietly, puzzled by his silence. Of course, she didn't know.
He took a deep breath, steeling himself, and opened it.
The echoing sounds of a large enclosed space came to them first, the kind of reverberating clangs and voices and other sounds as in an airplane hangar ... or a prison. There was a memorable smell of disinfectant, animal musk, and seawater. It punched Dane in the hindbrain and took him straight back to those not so long-ago days when he had been a prisoner here.
Taking a deep breath, he stepped through the door. Mira followed, holding her gun in a ready position.
They were on a catwalk above the large open space below them. It was a vast, long room, the prison at the heart of the island, lined with big steel cages on both sides. Many of the cages were empty—a surprising number, Dane noted, trying to keep his mind focused on the task without letting it slip off into the screaming abyss that awaited underneath.
The occupied cages, for the most part, contained what an uninformed observer might take for zoo animals. There were about two dozen of them. Some paced, some slept, some engaged in repetitive behavior like pawing at their cages or chewing on the bars. Many were large predators: tigers, bears, lions, wolves. There were also a variety of others, a couple of antelope and a buffalo, a fox and an odd piglike animal that Dane identified as a tapir.
The Colonel and his guard were starting to have trouble finding enough big predator shifters, Dane thought, focusing on the details to stop himself from thinking about the rest of it. They had already scoured the armed services of all countries for them, and now they were having to take ones that were less suitable. This misguided plan was doomed to fail anyway. But it wasn't soon enough for the prisoners who had already died.
Down the middle of the room, between the cages, there were a series of testing and training areas. Dane wondered if Mira, who was peering curiously over the railing, recognized what they were for. There were large tanks of water—one of which used to be Dane's home as an orca, just long enough that he could float in it, barely moving, with his nose touching one end and his tail the other.
He had to wrench his eyes away from it to the rest of the equipment, but there wasn't anything particularly nice to look at. There were some poles with chains attached to them, a chain and hook dangling from the ceiling, some relatively normal-looking workout equipment and balance bars, knotted rope ladders, and worst of all, an empty cage with nothing inside it but a set of different whips on a rack. All of it, in one way or another, had been used to torment them.
"Dane, what is this place?" Mira whispered. She kept her voice quiet, but several of the caged animals looked up. There was no way they could have remained unnoticed for long, Dane knew; the transformed shifters' sense of smell was too sharp for that.
